Two numbers rather than one, because "how well is this sensor coming in" is
two questions and they can disagree in a way that is worth seeing.
The first is strength: how far the sensor's burst stood above the noise of the
second it arrived in, in decibels, on every reading and in the log and the
spreadsheet. The burst detector already worked this out and threw it away --
it is the ratio the per-burst threshold is set from -- so this is carrying a
number through rather than measuring a new one.
What it is not is a power at the aerial, and the docstring says so where
somebody will read it. A dongle has no reference level and, with the tuner
left on automatic, no fixed gain either; anything in dBm would be invention.
A ratio of two amplitudes off the same receiver in the same second is the
honest quantity, and it is enough for the three things anybody wants a signal
reading for: comparing two sensors now, watching one over an evening, and
pointing an aerial. A fixed --gain makes it comparable between runs as well,
which the help now says.
It is coloured red, amber or green, it is on the live display as well as the
report, and it is kept on a narrow terminal when other columns are dropped --
because somebody moving a whip about while a number climbs is not doing it on
a wide window, and that is the most useful thing this does.
The second is the share of what a sensor sent that actually arrives, which
comes out of the timing for nothing. These transmit on a fixed cycle, so the
shortest wait ever seen between two of a sensor's messages is that cycle, and
the average wait is the cycle divided by the fraction getting through: one
over the other is the fraction, with no need to know the model or how often it
is meant to speak.
Read together they say more than either does alone. A strong signal with a
low share is interference or a collision rather than distance. A weak signal
at a hundred per cent is a sensor at the edge that is getting through anyway
and is best left alone.
The strongest of the three copies of a message is the one reported, not the
first: they go out milliseconds apart and arrive at whatever the fading does
to each. A reading with no strength -- an older log, a block with no
measurable noise floor to be a ratio to -- leaves the last known figure alone
rather than overwriting it with a zero.
Full suite 2369 passed, checked against five deliberately broken builds
including the one that reports decibels as a power ratio, which is off by a
factor of two and looks entirely reasonable. Built as 2026-09-07_06.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_016PsWPTweCT6pwxKngvVxcg
03d3600ecc